


Glass Memories

by HydraNoMago



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Bittersweet, Demon Shane Madej, Dialogue Heavy, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Memories, Mutual Pining, Supernatural - Freeform, references, shyan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27174472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HydraNoMago/pseuds/HydraNoMago
Summary: “There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness.”Ryan can’t help but wonder if there’s any truth to this maxim. He also can't help but wonder if Shane would like the cafe he was sitting in.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 15
Kudos: 46





	Glass Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who’s back with angst? No character deaths this time, promise. 
> 
> References galore, as usual see if you can spot them all!

* * *

**_You’re not even really here._ **

**_You’re just memories held in glass._ **

**_Do you know how many of you I could fill?_ **

**_I would shatter you._ **

**_~ Doctor Who_ **

* * *

He felt himself spacing out into the middle distance again, the unfocused eyes and wisps of thoughts drifting off to who knows where, before he forcefully yanked his leaving soul back into the present, blinking at the grain of the table. _Where was he again? Ah, yes. Here_. With slightly trembling fingers, he lifted the almost cold cup of coffee to his lips for a much needed dose of caffeine, and leaned heavily back against the chair. The people milling about in the cafe paid no attention to him; neither did the people buzzing to and fro on the streets. Ryan felt a sudden isolation; more than just the physical distance, it was the realisation that no one could ever really understand another person.

He sighed tiredly, rubbing a hand on his face and nudging his glasses; silently reminding himself of _why_ he had sat here for the past hour or so in the first place. It was one of those hole-in-the-wall places which Shane liked, he was sure of it, with cozy nooks and a peaceful ambience. There were university students grouped together with piles of papers on their tables, there were families who had popped in for a quick meal, and there were couples both young and old facing each other with smiles on their faces.

Since the place was quite full, it wasn’t a big surprise then when someone cleared their throat above Ryan’s head and gestured at the empty seat across him. “Sorry, but uh, is this seat taken?”

Snapping out of his reverie, Ryan hastily answered “No” without swivelling his head to take a good look at the other.

“Oh, cheers! Thanks man,” the stranger exclaimed, plopping himself down unceremoniously with a bagel in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Ryan watched as he settled the cup near the window and started tucking into his bagel with relish. His stare must have been unconsciously piercing, for the stranger looked up sheepishly and wiped the edge of his mouth with a sleeve before saying, “Sorry, forgot my manners a bit there.” He brushed the crumbs off his hands and stuck one across the table, a peace offering of sorts, “Dawid Nowak, I’m a wannabe painter.”

With a small amount of trepidation, Ryan took up the offer, “Ryan Bergara. I make YouTube videos.”

“Oh really?” Dawid grinned, “That sounds super cool.”

“Thanks,” Ryan replied lightly, and tried to hide his suspicion with his cup of coffee. He wasn’t one to be egoistical, but he could never help but wonder if his face wasn’t plastered all over the internet through memes already; and if so was everyone out to pick at him like they would poke a liger at the circus.

Dawid however, seemed more interested in his bagel than who Ryan was. After a few beats of silence between them, when Dawid devoured his lunch and drained his coffee with an obscenely loud slurp, he turned his gaze back to Ryan who was once again lost in his thoughts. “So, why are you here anyway, Ryan Bergara?”

He really wanted to either continue staring out the window or plainly asking Dawid to _please shut up, can’t you see I want to be left alone?_ , but decided that the overcast day was gloomy enough; he didn’t need to hurt someone else’s good natured attempts at a civil conversation on top of it. “I thought my friend would have liked this place.”

“Your friend?” Dawid craned his neck to scan the whole establishment. “Are you waiting for them? If so, I’m really sorry for taking up the space,” he apologised with his hands held upward, legs already pushing him off the chair.

“No, no,” Ryan said hurriedly, moving to stop him from leaving. Something nagged at the back of his head, but he ignored it. “Please,” he gestured to the chair, and Dawid slowly sank back down, wary as a spooked animal. “Sorry, I’m just—” Ryan huffed, pinching the bridge of his nose, “Um, my friend isn’t here.”

Dawid worked his jaw and his brows furrowed deeply, reminding Ryan of a disgruntled cat, and something else he couldn’t entirely put his finger on. “Look, um, Ryan,” Dawid muttered, eyes set to the space beside Ryan’s head, “I’m sorry for prying, and I’d get it if you don’t want me to, but are you okay?”

The question was so incongruous that it shook Ryan a little. He drew his own brows together tightly. “Why?”

“Because you, well,” Dawid stopped with a look of frustration, worry and interestingly, guilt. He clamped his mouth shut, opened it and tried again, “You said your friend _would_ have liked this place, so…”

Ryan caught the trailed off sentence to save Dawid from his misery, “He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Oh,” Dawid breathed, obviously relieved from having to show sympathy for a complete stranger, “that’s good. Um, that’s really good.”

“Yeah, it is,” Ryan said through a small smile, even though the piece of metal in his heart twisted painfully. He ran a hand through his hair, hated how oily it felt and made a mental note to finally get cleaned up. He couldn’t mope around in despair forever. He flicked his eyes across the table to Dawid, who had wrung his fingers together in a nervous gesture, and was avoiding Ryan’s eye line for fear of awkwardness; and something in how innocent and lost Dawid seemed loosened Ryan’sown tongue. “I can’t remember who my friend is,” he admitted plainly, relishing in the shock of Dawid’s face.

“You what?” came his surprised voice, cracking on the last syllable. Dawid cleared his throat noisily and tried again, “How would you know who your friend is?”

“I know who he is, it’s just…” Ryan gave a helpless shrug, eyes darting between the other customers happy in their own bubbles, the faceless waves of pedestrians outside, and the concerned yet intrigued look of the stranger before him. _Fuck it_ , he told himself. “I have amnesia. A really severe one, but somehow it clouds only the identity of my friend, and not anything else.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “My best friend,” he amended, a flash of white teeth and a high reedy laugh tumbling through his mind.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dawid sympathised, looking into his empty coffee cup. “That must really fucking suck.”

Ryan shot him a _no-shit_ look and dropped his head into his hands. “The universe loves playing dice with me,” he bemoaned, muffled. He ran his hands down his face again, sitting back up. “It never seems to give me a break.” Another unbidden memory, of warm hands and boisterous laughter. They were shooting for Test Friends, he was sure. There were a lot of drinks, and then a lot _more_ drinks; a limo and bars and disco lights blinking above them. He remembers being pressed up against him, all lanky lines and the smell of booze on their breaths. He remembers being drunk with pleasure, and choking on love.

Dawid must have noticed something peculiar about the look on his face (or the way it softened into a dreamy yet pained mien), because his frown deepened. “What’s his name?”

Ryan swallowed through the hard lump which had formed in his throat, and tried to hold on to the whispered syllables through the dense fog in his mind. “Shane, his name is Shane.” At the sound of his name, Ryan allowed the warmth that accompanied it to run through his veins, quirking his lips into a small smile. He almost missed the harsh intake of breath Dawid took. “Do you know him? Really tall guy, like a Sasquatch,” he gestured, pushing his arm as high as it will go. “Shane Madej?” He was aware of the crazed desperation tinging his voice, how it became light and breathless, wavered, hoping, _praying_.

With a look of pity which Ryan hated, Dawid shook his head sadly. “No. Sorry, but no.”

“Oh.” The fight seemed to deflate in him all at once, and he slumped back into his chair, not aware that he had leaned so far forward in his haste that Dawid had subtly pushed away from the table. “It’s okay,” he said with a visibly forced smile. “He’s hard to get a hold of anyway.”

“Isn’t there anyone around you who knows where he is?” Dawid ventured lightly. “In the office? Family? Friends?”

Ryan barked a hollow laugh, which made Dawid recoil. “No one knows where he is. Not even the police,” he sighed. There had been a mountain of reports, the bustling station, the flurry of worry from everyone around him; but no Shane. It was like he just awoke one morning and decided to disappear, so he did. Knowing Shane, that was probably exactly what he did.

“Do you know what he looks like?”

_That’s a good question_. Ryan worked the gears in his brain, trying to find a way to explain what it was to Dawid without sounding like a lunatic or desperate or both. He drummed the tips of his fingers on the table a few times. “The weird thing with this amnesia is that I can’t remember him, not even after being shown pictures or videos of him.” But he can remember what it felt like to be around Shane, how happy he was, how carefree, how he felt like he could accomplish anything, _anything at all_ ; as long as Shane stayed by his side. At Dawid’s confused look, Ryan elaborated, “It’s like there’s something in my brain that’s blocking my memory, any memory, that concerns Shane. I could see his photo but not recognise him. I could watch videos of us together and remember how much fun we had, how strong our bond was, but somehow I can’t ever pinpoint that the person right next to me is my best friend.”

He was picking on his fingers again in anxiety, and huffed a hollow laugh. “I know his name is Shane,” he said resolutely to the grain of the table. “I know we travelled together for shoots. I know that he’s a hard ass skeptic but he accompanies me anyway, I know the idiot tried to touch Anabelle once, I know that we agreed on almost all the same things except when it came to spirits, and—” Someone in the cafe laughed, the sound discordant to his ears. “I know he told me something very important during our last trip, before the accident and before everything around me turned black, but I have no idea what he said.” He smiled self-depreciatingly through his frustration, “Or what he looked like. Or how he talked. Or laughed…there’s nothing there.” The metal in his heart twisted painfully. “Just nothing.”

Dawid nodded to Ryan’s cup, “Do you want another one? On me.” Before Ryan could ask why, and perhaps maybe request Dawid to wipe that look of pity off his face, Dawid held up a hand. “No offence, but life is giving you too much grief. Just accept a cup of coffee.”

“Do I sound that anguished?” Ryan teased in an attempt to flip the conversation around into a lighter mood.

“Yes, you do,” came the reply without hesitation, and without the expected sympathy dripping from every syllable. It was a fact rather than forced social graces, and it made Ryan feel a little less stupid for airing out his story to this virtual stranger. Dawid flagged down a waiter for two more of their coffees, then swivelled back to Ryan. “This Shane person,” he mused, toying with the edge of a plate, “you must like him very much.”

Ryan felt his heckles rise without a good reason, but the defensiveness he categorised as a protective blanket around Shane’s memory. This stranger had no right to assume anything. “Now why do you say that?” he asked lowly.

Perhaps sensing the animosity, Dawid held out his hands in a placating gesture and smiled softly. “The way you talk about him. Like he’s—”

“Like he’s what?” Ryan snapped.

Frustratingly undeterred, Dawid continues with an arched brow “Like he’s someone you miss more than you would a missing limb. Like he had a space carved specially for him in you.”

His mouth was dry and his heart was thumping loudly in his chest. The waiter brought their drinks over, and Dawid thanked them, but to Ryan it all felt like it was happening to someone else. He rubbed at his eyes again, and wiped the lens of his glasses with his shirt for good measure. When he slipped them on again, he caught Dawid gazing at him with what could only be classified as bittersweet. Something clicked insistently against the fog in Ryan’s brain, but when he prodded it further, there was nothing but smoke. He hastily took a deep drink of coffee from his cup, welcoming the burn.

“For what it’s worth,” Dawid carefully tread, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some videos you two were in, and I think that,” here he paused and shrugged, seemed to gather himself, “I think that whatever you feel for him, he does for you too.”

Ryan squinted his eyes at him, a slow boiling anger rising from his gut. Dawid quickly amended himself, “Look, I know you guys did Unsolved, and I love that show but I didn’t wanna freak you out so I didn’t say anything at first, but really, cross my heart; you two seem like you care for each other a lot.” He pointed his eyebrows up at the last word.

He wanted to do so many things. Crash Dawid’s head into the window maybe. Stomp out of the cafe. Start shouting all the accusatory words he had in his head like _how fucking dare you, how dare you assume anything, how dare you pretend you didn’t know who I was, how dare you try to pluck information from me like a fucking vulture_ ; but he was **tired**. Ryan was so, so tired. He had been running on fumes ever since he woke up in the hospital, and this stupid amnesia and stupid Shane who disappeared was not helping matters. So instead of giving in and doing all of the above, Ryan took deep breaths, drank his coffee measuredly and reigned in his anger.

“The worst thing would be to decide it was love, and then to discover that it hadn’t been,” he quoted dully, keeping his arms crossed against his chest, keeping the shattered pieces of his heart there.

“No,” Dawid said forcefully, startling Ryan a little at the tone and the sudden hard glint in his eyes. “The worst thing would be to decide it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later—old and unconsoled—that it had been.”

Ryan clicked his tongue, not wanting to admit to himself how deep those words cut. “You sound like you’ve been around the block,” he said bitterly, levelling a withering glare at the other.

Dawid’s stretched smile was thin and pained. “You could say that,” he conceded. He traced the lip of his coffee cup with a finger. The glint in his eyes was gone. “It’s the story of everyone. Everything has its time, and everything ends.”

“Not everything,” Ryan countered fiercely, “Not love.” He kept his eyes on Dawid’s face, searching as the other seemed to hide more than what he knew. The other’s jaw had a tick in it, like he was forcing himself to keep his mouth shut and not reveal the gushing dam of all his secrets.

“You’re quite the optimist,” Dawid laughed, mock toasted him and sipped his coffee, but even to Ryan’s ears he wasn’t quite convincing. Before Ryan could pry into it further though, Dawid changed the topic, “Are you still looking for him?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well,” Dawid shrugged, a teasing smirk at his lips signalling that he was joking, “he could be anyone right? He could be me, for all you know.”

Ryan fought the urge to roll his eyes at the man opposite him. Seriously and sincerely he said with resolution, “If there’s one thing I know about him, just one thing,” he held up a finger, “If I met him again, I would absolutely know.” Something in Dawid’s face crumpled. _Serves you right for making that crass joke_ , Ryan thought.

Dawid cleared his throat and rummaged in his pockets. “Well, it has been very nice to meet you Ryan Bergara.” He tossed some bills on the table and stood up abruptly, made to walk right out the door, but stuttered in his step and stopped, turning to Ryan instead. He held up a hand for Ryan to shake, and although Ryan would have preferred not to, basic decorum made him do it automatically anyway. _His hands are soft_ , came the involuntary thought which Ryan violently shook away.

Dawid smiled down at him, a real smile which creased the edges of his eyes endearingly and softened his overall rather angled features. “There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness,” he said pointedly, hopefully, hand still clutched with Ryan’s own. He looked at their linked hands somewhat longingly, before letting go. “I hope you do well in life, Ryan.” Without waiting for a reply, he left hurriedly through the door, the jingling of the bell and his coffee cup the only sign that he was ever there.

* * *

The door slammed and Mark adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. Beside him, Shane was a harried mess, hair sticking up wildly from where he must have run his fingers through it, shirt tails peeking out of his chinos and the dark tendrils of his power swirling like agitated smoke. “Where to now?” Mark asked cautiously, keeping one eye on Shane and one eye on the road of pedestrians.

“Away,” Shane grumbled, going back to pulling at his hair. “Anywhere but here.”

Mark nodded, but his fingers were locked onto the steering wheel. He tossed Shane another glance and was becoming increasingly worried as the other’s power seeped out more. “Shane,” he called gently, “are you sure about this?”

Shane’s animalistic growl revealed his fangs at Mark. “Stop asking me that!”

“But Shane, you’ve got to be reasonable…” Mark ventured.

“I am being fucking reasonable!” He exclaimed with the tone of a person, or in this case, demon; who had been through this argument a thousand times. “I’m the reason we’re in this mess in the first place! And no—” he shushed Mark with a hand pushed up into his face, “I don’t want to hear about this anymore. It was _my_ fault that that Greater demon attacked us, it was _my_ fault that we were careless, and it was _my fucking fault_ that Ryan got hurt.”

Mark shoved the other’s hand away with more force than was allowed between a lower level demon and a Greater one. He really didn’t care if Shane was his boss right now. “It’s also _your_ fault that Ryan can’t remember you now,” he said pointedly.

“You want him to relive that night?” Shane spat. “Want him to remember all the horrors and the blood, Mark?”

“Of course not,” he grit in annoyance. “But you just upping and leaving without an explanation hurts him more than any other horrors could.”

Shane felt like he was slapped in the face, even though he was aware of the truth this whole time. Seeing Ryan today had been a last goodbye; he just didn’t think it was going to be this hard. The look of anguished despair, yet that kernel of hope, that _unrelenting hope_ , in Ryan’s face made Shane feel guilty of his own existence. He wanted to reach across the table and remove the fog he had planted in Ryan’s brain, he wanted to _so_ badly. For Ryan to recognise him. For Ryan to get angry at him. For Ryan to just _see_ him, all of him.

But when he thinks back to that accidental night, he can’t. He can’t subject Ryan, his sweet, generous, and brave Ryan, to any of those horrors again. He never wanted to cradle a cold and bleeding Ryan again. He never wanted to hurt him, and now he would make sure he won't get the chance to. 

“Just drive me to the airport,” he whispered, sinking back into his seat and pushing a balled fist against his chin. Beside him, Mark shot him an angry glare, but started the car. Shane closed his eyes as he felt the rumble of the engine, and sent a prayer to whoever was listening: _Please, keep Ryan safe_. The sky was a striking blue now, and he hoped someone would hear.

As they rounded the shoulder of the road, Shane saw Ryan rushing out of the cafe and his heart dropped. Ryan was frantic, rushing forwards and stopping, looking around, then doing the same in the opposite direction. He scanned the sea of faces, scanned the cars, but saw no one; even though he had the strongest feeling that Shane was close by.

The car rumbled forwards, and Shane pressed a hand on the glass as they pulled away further and further from Ryan, craning his neck until theonly person he ever truly loved was swallowed by the crowd.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> If you guessed references from Doctor Who, Everyone Brave is Forgiven and Nietzsche, then a big congratulations to you!  
> (Also tell us the secret to knowing so much please) 
> 
> BONUS: According to Google, Dawid = "friend" and Nowak = "new" (And that's that only name that Shane would come up with) 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Little light on the angst on this one, but hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! 
> 
> Do check out my other Shyan fics if you’d like too.


End file.
